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ACTING SMALL

A little while ago we talked about “Think Big”. The nasty little brother of this is “Acting Small”.

There is an art to taking a bold vision and translating it down into your daily todo list. And then, when you’re in the weeds of it and fighting your daily fires, not to lose sight of your original plan.

Here are a couple of techniques which have helped me over the years to beat this challenge into submission:

Verne Harnish’s One-Page-Strategic Plan is an excellent tool to create literally a one-pager which compiles the different time horizons of your business into a single, cohesive plan. We use it at WebFWD (you can watch me explain the process on video here) and Verne’s book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” goes into more detail as well.

Jen Pahlka (of Code for America fame) created a neat pyramid model which links mission to strategy and action. Tim O’Reilly wrote about it, I adopted it for Mozilla and made (yet another) video explaining the process.

On the simplest level — write your vision statement on a big piece of paper and hang it on a wall so you can see it every day. Then simply ask yourself every time you start doing something if what you’re doing right now will move you closer to that vision. And take some time once a week to reflect on the work you’ve done throughout the week and how it fits into your big master plan.

Think big — act small. :)

P.S. I started doing office hours a little while ago — they turned out to be a ton of fun (for me at least — not sure if the entrepreneurs enjoy them as well). I’ve got a couple of open slots for July. If you’re interested in spending 30 minutes with me to talk about any topic you like — pick a slot.